Normal Animals (or A Letter to a Man About His Father)
by Juno Bernike
Summary: "Last night I dreamed I was a cow again."


Dear Nero (and your wife, who I assume is reading over your shoulder),

Last night I dreamed I was a cow again.

It's always the same meadow I find myself in—moonlit, wide and gently sloping upward into a dusky treeline. The same distant and clouded moon hovering in an ink-blue sky. And the same grass beneath my feet, wavering softly in the breeze. I guess in these dreams I could be anything, really, since I'm in a dream and I don't have too many occasions to look down at my body or think about what I'm doing, or how many legs I'm standing on or anything like that. I just know, in that implicit way you just know things in a dream, that I am a cow and have always been a cow, and that if I were to look down for whatever reason, I'd find that I had hooves, and even a set of udders if the dream-making part of my brain was really feeling wacky that night.

That's how I'm starting this letter, alright? With my cow dream. I've got a pile on the desk of letters that I didn't like the start of—turns out I sat down to write a letter without having a clue how to start one. And I've been dying to tell someone about these damned cow dreams, so in a fit of genius I'm knocking out both problems in one.

Anyway. The cow dream. I'm standing in the meadow in the cow dream. And there aren't any other cows around. I'm just alone in the grass, listening to the blades rush against one another as the wind passes through them. And there's nothing I can see besides some trees, and the gentle rise and fall of the hilly terrain, and those distant trees. Again, I just seem to know things—one thing I know is that there's people out in the trees. More cows, maybe, I dunno. And all I want is to set off for that treeline as fast as my dumb cow legs can take me. So I think, alright, let's go, and I make to move my leg, but I can't. There's nothing holding me down physically, like a trap or a harness or anything. I simply will not move.

I start to panic a little. Sometimes I get so panicked that the feeling is still sitting in my chest when I wake up. I want to move. I want to find the cows or whoever. But I can't. All I can do is blink and chew and moo pathetically. Soon enough, there's movement in the trees and I'm like, yeah! Someone is coming to help me up to the treeline, I think! I tap my little hooves in anticipation. But as the little narrow figure gets closer I realize it's nobody I know. The distant, gauzy form, slowly approaching, is menacing, somehow—it's just not quite _right_ , the way it's shaped. Its long, featureless form seems perverse against the rippling grass. I moo at it to make it go away, but nothing halts it. Once it's almost close enough that I can make out its face, I usually wake up, slick with sweat but safe in my bed.

And that's how it was this morning. I've been having this dream a few times a year since I was about twenty-five and I'm still not sure what it's all supposed to mean. Not that I've looked into it all that hard—for all the hocus pocus I don't really have the option of denying there are still a few things I'm not so sure I buy into, and the idea that dreams have some deep, special meaning is one of them. That being said, dreaming that you're a barnyard animal over and over again for years isn't exactly normal, and with no immediate supernatural explanation I have to assume its my subconscious' way of telling me something. Exactly what, though, I'll probably never know.

Ha. I can hear you and your girl downstairs, trying to be quiet. Hard to do with that arm of yours, but you're really trying. Plus she keeps shushing you too loudly—you really shoulda had her wait outside. Ask Lady to help next time. She tries to surprise me every year and she pretty much always succeeds.

I already know when I head downstairs and pretend to be surprised—and yes, I'll pretend, if only for Kyrie's sake—and after we eat and you guys sing to me and all that other crap, you're gonna pull me aside and awkwardly ask me why I don't like to celebrate my birthday. And I'm gonna tell you the same thing I told you yesterday and the day before that and every other time you tried to plan shit for my birthday—"Oh, I just don't like the attention." And you're gonna believe me! Again! It blows me the hell away how unperceptive you are sometimes, kid. Since when do I not like attention? I love attention. And I love getting to eat food that I didn't have to pay for. You aren't half as dumb as I was at your age but you're still dumb as a stick sometimes.

Anyway, I'm writing the real reason down because it's too uncomfortable to say out loud. That's why I'm writing you a letter at all—I mean, yeah, the two of you won't have phones at the lodge and I'll have to write, but it's really just a good reason too do something I'd been meaning to do anyway. I've just got stuff to say to you and—don't hate me for saying this, though I know you will—you are really hard to talk to, kid. I'm already not good at doing meaningful family-type talking and you never make it easy. This way I've got time to make sure I say stuff right, and I don't ave to be around when you read it. I feel like you're gonna cry and I don't wanna be around when it happens.

Ah, hell. Is it kind of a dick move to make you cry on your honeymoon? Well, it's too late to go back. I already started.

Anyway. The real reason.

I quit celebrating my birthday when I was about your age. The festivities surrounding the event had already tapered off the way they're bound to as you get old and busy—you've picked up on this phenomenon yourself, I'm sure—and a few times I forgot it had even come around, but I didn't make the conscious decision to say _to hell with it_ until one year when I woke up, looked over at my clock and my calendar and saw my birthday marked off like I always had it, and felt nothing but irritation at myself for having written it down at all. Was I really that in love with myself that I needed to mark down my birthday like it was a national holiday or something? I crossed it off the calender and never wrote it down again. I'd like to say I stopped acknowledging it entirely, but I didn't. Every year I felt it coming around, feared it a little. I don't fear growing older, at all actually—I welcome it, if only for the hope that time will do as people says it does and heal wounds, and at the same time grant me with some kind of wisdom, or grace, or something. What I hated was the day itself. See, my birthday is your dad's birthday, too. And at some point, thinking about your dad turned painful. Not painful in a wistful, heartache-fueled way (though it's like that, sometimes. I can't lie about that), but in a tired way, like a chore you don't particularly like doing. I couldn't just have my birthday and pretend he wasn't a year older, too. I couldn't just look in the mirror and take in the changes that had occurred in my appearance and not think about the way his face might be changing too, wherever he was. Was he aging like me? Was he aging better? Does he look like dad, like I do? I hate all that, Nero. I hate it. Even thinking about it right now is pissing me off.

He's why I wanted to talk to you, kid. You've never asked me about him and I can see that you want to. Sometimes I can even tell when you're trying to convince yourself to bring it up, the few times you had the opening to. Like that time you were helping me brick up that lady's house I busted open, and as I was knocking up the mortar you came over and awkwardly asked me where the bolsters were, right after I'd literally seen you set them down a few feet away? I know you were going to try and ask me about Vergil. Yeah, how about that? I bet you feel pretty called out right now. I've got a sixth sense for that kind of awkwardness, kid. Don't feel too bad, though. We're both too cowardly to talk about it.

I don't know that the best way to tell you about my brother is to summarize him, to be honest. It's not exactly easy to summarize anybody, is it? How would you sum yourself up? I know I can't categorize myself all that well. Depends how much I like myself that day. And anytime I try to get a handle on Vergil, I fail to imagine some rigid checklist, some easy compilation of traits, ready to be enumerated. For every descriptor that I envision I remember some aspect of him that contradicts it. That's how people are, unfortunately—we're too arrogant to have humble and easy personalities, like an animal might. In reaching for such terms to describe him my mind lands on moments, and memories, more so than anything else, and in the cluster of rejected descriptors that follow still the memories—of things he did, of things he said—remain. So that's how I choose to present him to you now. Saying he was arrogant, foolish, hardheaded, stubborn, cold, etc., would tell you nothing. In fact that's exactly how I"d describe you, and how he'd describe me, how Trish might describe Lady. Do you see what I mean? Adjectives mean nothing. The way that I really knew him is through memories. So, here. When I have to think about your father, beyond the cloudy, distant miasma of him that has hung over my head for years...this is how I remember him. It's going to be a long one. I hope you're sitting down.

The first memory that stands out is in fact a memory of the absence of him, rather than Vergil himself, and the memory itself is blurry. Indistinct, and it comes in impressions rather than images, for the most part. I was only eight when this memory took place, so naturally I've got no way of knowing how much of it is real and how much of it I've retroactively fitted myself over the years. I remember sitting in the sloping front yard of the house I grew up in. I _distinctly_ remember the car—an ash-gray Chevy Gemello—rolling up the long gravel drive. I watched it pull through the front gate, past the fountainhead and all the way to the front entrance. The metal flakes in the paint made it light up in the early evening sunset, like wet cement. I know it was a Chevy Gemello because no other two-door Chevy had those weird triangular doors. Then I found out years later that they didn't even make Chevy Gemellos back then, not for another few years. There's no way I saw a Chevy Gemello that day, but according to the unreliable rat-trap of my memories, I did. There's all sorts of things I probably remembered wrong, too. Maybe the men—the _men_ —I saw stepping out were wearing white suits and not red. Maybe my mother saw them pulling up before I did, where she was sitting cross-legged at the base of one of the huge oak trees (who's to say they were oaks?) with a book in her lap, or maybe her head was down the whole time till I said, "Mom, are those dad's friends?" Maybe she was nervous when she told me to hide behind one of the stone walls between the rocks. Maybe she was playful, like it was a game we were about to play and she was giving me a head start. I can't remember.

One thing I remember for sure, with the certainty only a lasting guilt can bring, is that I never wonder where Vergil was for a second. I didn't ask about him, didn't scan the yard, didn't squint up at the house at the bedroom windows to see if he might be up there. It didn't cross my mind, not even as my mother went to ask those men if she could help them. Not even as their legs stretched and bent inward, and their bodies hunched and obscured my mother form view. Certainly not as I heard two guttural, animalistic screams—first the clotted, victorious cry of a beast closing in on easy prey, and the primal call of fear—before my hands went over my ears and I shut my eyes.

No. My brother did not cross my mind until much, much later, as I sat in the car of one of my dad's few remaining collaborators. As he shouted into a payphone outside I realized for the first time with the hefty melodrama only an eight year old can procure that I might be alone. My father and my mother were _gone_. The weight of the word and its hideous implication suffocated me in that backseat. My mind reeled, clicked through my options, and landed, finally, on Vergil.

I can hardly remember anything involving the two of us before then. Thus my earliest memory, my most powerful recollection of Vergil is that I forgot about him. And I never found out where he is, where he'd been. If he'd watched my mother get torn apart from the window upstairs before squeezing beneath a bed or into a wardrobe. Maybe he'd only heard her being murdered, too afraid to even move his hands over his ears. Or maybe he never watched her die at all—didn't see what remained of her afterwards, like I did, until he was swept up by some underling of my father's and informed that his mother was dead. Maybe he didn't even believe it, at first. I wouldn't have. Maybe that's what started it all. If Vergil did what I didn't do and thought of me. Maybe that's what rendered that divide between us. I'll never know for sure. You never can.

The next memory makes me laugh when I think about it. You'll probably wonder why the hell it would, once you start reading it. And, well...I don't really have an answer as to why. It's not particularly funny. Not in a straightforward way, or an ironic way, even.

Vergil and I were fifteen or sixteen years old, and we were fighting. We were in this wooded area behind the boarding school we were attending at the time—a thicket of trees with a cover so dense, I swear to you sunlight wouldn't come in and it was dark as night in the middle of the day if you went in far enough. We'd go in there for privacy, because when we fought it usually got bloody quick. We weren't _sparring_ , mind you—we sparred every chance we got, but that was practice. No, we were having a full on brawl. I was pissed, and so was he, and I can't remember for the life of me over what. I just remember that at some point he got the best of me, and he was kneeling over me with his knees braced on either side of my ribs, and he had his sword (I still remember that sword, an ugly replica of a Gaelic backsword that we got secondhand. Took forever to sharpen up. He'd hated so much he hadn't even bothered to name it) lodged right beneath my ribs. That was a point scored for Vergil, as far as our fights usually went—either one pins the other or someone gives up. And neither of us ever gave up.

This time was different. He drew his sword out of me and as I tried to will my ragged diaphragm together so I could breathe, he sat above me, now resting on his haunches and looking right at me (those eyes somehow always _colder_ than mine, blue as ice chips and just as hard). Blood poured from my lips, bubbled from my nose. So much blood that I was gagging on it, and he just watched me. Already I sensed something was about to happen, if only because where I usually stuck around to taunt him, he usually backed off immediately after besting me, content to watch me wallow in my defeat. And I was, I have to reiterate, bested—Vergil knew exactly where to pin an enemy so they wouldn't be getting back up anytime soon. He knew exactly how far in to drive his sword, and which angle would be hardest for me to rip it back out. And he never, ever took the sword out himself, not back then. Watching me struggle to right myself was almost as good as driving the sword home, for him. So when he removed the sword...I confess felt dread. I felt what other people must feel when they look at Vergil. I felt nervous. I wanted to get away from him, for a moment. As much as we always fought, I'd never had such an atavistic revulsion to him before. I think I even made to pull away, to drag myself out from under him, before he fell back to his knees and sat on my stomach, the weight of him holding me down.

And then. And _then_ , kid. I don't know how else to put it.

Your dad started trying to kill me.

I can't mince words, not even now that I've set aside time to try and do so. Vergil tried to _kill_ me. He wasn't even angry anymore, I could see it in his eyes. This wasn't him rising to meet some final straw, some unforgivable grievance. This wasn't his temper finally flowing over and getting the best of him. I wasn't watching my brother lose his cool, finally, in my presence.

He just wanted to see.

He grabbed the sword by the stiff, dull back of the blade and drove it right down into my chest, and pulled straight down, right into the first wound he'd made, which was already mostly closed. He rendered the healing tissue open and then flipped the blade and went back up, then drew the blade up at an angle on either side, so that when he was finished there was a ragged letter Y cut into my body—like a cadaver, and his gaze upon me was fitting. Like I was a specimen and he was merely fulfilling his academic duty of cutting me open to see what was inside.

Naturally, I was losing strength pretty rapidly at this point. I mean, you've probably been torn open a time or two yourself, so I'm sure you know. I couldn't breath much at all, which was probably the worst part, and the pain, though not much worse than the thousands of severe chest wounds I've sustained in my life, felt amplified by the sheer helplessness I felt, pinned below my brother. And holy crap, the _blood_. I dunno how we fit it all in us. It bathed my skin, my clothes, the stiff grass all around us. It splashed up onto Vergil, onto his featureless and quietly observant face and contrasting grotesquely with his eyes and the palor of his skin. His expression hardly changed the whole time he was trying to kill me. His brow knit just a little, as his fingers slipped on the blood-slicked skin, and as he tried to peel the flesh of my chest open and found that the muscle was stubbornly healing too quickly for him to tear it open. But aside from those minor flickers, he remained the image of the studious pupil. If not for all the blood he might have been reading a book.

I was crying by then. My eyes burned, from the pain and the confusion. My arms couldn't seem to lift, no matter how hard I tried to stop him, and all I could do was flex my fingers, wiggle them uselessly against the ground. I think I tried to say, "Please stop that," and all that came out was a guttural _please_ , which is way more melodramatic than I wanted.

If I have to be honest, though. Even if some bolt of energy had struck me and I'd been blessed with the strength to stop him, I'd have let him carry on. I _was_ letting him carry on. I kind of wanted to know, too. Just as he was watching my face for my realization that I was moments away from slipping to oblivion, I too wanted to know my limit. I wanted to get that close. Killing someone, and being killed, it turns out, is one of the most intimate things you can do to someone. Actually, it's _the_ most intimate thing you can do. There, I said it. Sex doesn't come close. Sorry to be perverse but none of the women I've ever been with have made me feel the way your dad did when he set upon me with his mind made up to kill me. I don't care how twisted that sounds. It's the truth. I want you to know that because—try not to laugh out loud at this one—I don't want to demonize your dad too much. He was a sick bastard but there was something wrong with me too.

That's the crux of it all, isn't it? There was something wrong with us, kid. There's always been something wrong with your dad and I. Beyond the demon blood, and the rivalry. There's something wrong with us in a way that humans can be flawed, too. A bit of sickness that I can't begin to cure, doesn't really heal up like my other wounds do. Maybe it set in when I watched my mother die. Maybe when I first thought I would be alone forever. Maybe it _is_ from my dad. Or maybe my mother had it and gave it to me. I've seen it in other people, kid. I've seen regular people in the corner booth at bars, or standing behind the counter at the corner store. It's what made us fight over nothing. It's what makes me push people away even though I know I'm the worst when I'm alone. It's what makes it so hard for me to think about Vergil, even years after I put him down for good.

I can't even put into words how much I miss him, kid. I miss him so much sometimes it feels like I'll drown in it. Don't mistake this for emotional depth, either—if I had depth of emotion I think I would sorted through the pain by now and I'd have moved on. Instead it's like a puddle and all I can see is the watery, miserable surface. If he showed up one day, fresh from the grave, with Lady's head hanging from one hand and Trish's in the other, and proceeded to burn my house down, part of me would still be happy to see him. You have no idea how infuriating that reality is. He's like a curse that I can't get free of. A miserable tenant of my mind, living there forever, and rent-free.

Eventually, Vergil got a little too caught up in the details as he was hacking me open, and I recovered just enough strength to spit some blood into his face. He withdrew, wiping blood and spit from his eyes as I struggled to breathe—I think I may have called him a "friggin' jerk", which is quite the pearl-clutcher, if I do say so myself. And after that we found a creek to wash off in and cleaned ourselves up as best we could, and then we rode our bikes to a Sharon's Garden and convinced the cook to give us some hash browns they were going to throw out. Vergil took a few bites of his before he reached across the vinyl-top booth we were sequestered away in and slid them onto my plate, saying he wasn't that hungry, and hated potatoes anyway. Would you believe it if I told you he was looking out for me? If not, it means I've been doing something right and you're getting an idea of what your dad was like after all. Hell, I wouldn't believe it either, and I was there. He _was_ , though. He never hated potatoes.

There are a few more that spring to mind. Your dad and I (I keep calling him "your dad" if only to convince myself of the fact. I still have a hard time imagining that he had a kid. Do you get the sense so far that he was an intimate person? Well, he was, but only in the violent sense. And only if he really didn't like you, the way he really didn't like me. violence was cutting, and purposeful. it had a point. not with me, though. the times he wanted me to suffer, he made sure I did. that's intimacy, fella. violence and intimacy may seem like different sides of the coin but it's all the same coin in the end. remember that next time you have the chance to really hurt someone.)

Wait, what was I saying? I shouldn't have used a pen. Now I've got to leave all senile ramblings in.

Right. There are a few more things that spring to mind. I thought I'd tell you about all the times I had to put Vergil down. I think you might've picked up here and there what happened the last few times we fought. I might've even written out at least the fiasco with the tower out in depth, but what would be the point? I don't know if I want to think about them to that depth anyway. And I say, specifically, that I _put him down_ , because it never felt like I was killing him. Maybe that's some pathetic part of me trying to rationalize my own actions, because who the hell wants to say they had to kill their own brother over and over again? But I had that day in the thicket as a ruler, some invariable standard I could measure every instance against, and they all fell short. I was cutting him down, defeating him, letting him go, but never killing him the way he'd nearly killed me.

All but that last time.

By the time I finally killed your dad, he'd changed. He wasn't entirely Vergil anymore—more a decayed shell that wore my brother's face, and a face I didn't even recognize until it was too late. In a way, I was cheated of killing him the way he deserved to be killed. I wish I'd known what he was thinking, when he removed his helmet and showed me his face. Good lord, I didn't _recognize him_ , kid. What did that do to him? How did he feel? Did he hate me? Was he sad? Was he ever? I know I'm getting a good seat in hell for saying this, but I feel cheated that I didn't get to kill him _right_ . I wanted to look in his eyes as the light left them, feel his heartbeat pulse and stutter. The way he went—terrified, in agony, and as little more than the grasping, whipped arm of a greater evil—didn't suit him. Killing is already such an unpleasantly alluring act, kid. I'd like to say it's like watching those car wreck shows on TV, but it's sadder than that—those at least come with the knowledge that other people are tuning in for fun, too. When you kill somebody you know that only the evil and unfortunate have shared the sight. It's a lonely feeling. Like sitting in your office writing letters to the future for your nephew who is right downstairs.

Or, I guess, like waking up in an empty field on a quiet night, in a cow's body.

This is kind of taking a lot out of me, and the sun's starting to come up all the way, which means I'll have to come downstairs at some point and face the festivities. I'm probably going to leave this with Morrison as soon as possible, because if I hold onto it I'll chicken out and shred it or something. I'll have him send it the day after you leave and hopefully it'll reach you. It's definitely gotta get to you, though, because there's something I didn't tell you—I won't be around when you get back. _Probably_ , anyway. I've got some sketchy jobs coming up and then afterwards I'm going off for a bit. Trish and Lady already know.

 _But Dante, you always come back_ , you must be saying (and through tears, of course, inconsolable at the prospect of not seeing your dear uncle again). And you've got plenty reason to say so, being that I usually do come back. But I've always wanted to. I'm not so sure I want to anymore.

The fact of the matter is, there have been times, after I killed Vergil, when I hoped I'd die. I'm not suicidal, kid. I wouldn't even say I'm depressed. I haven't been hiding away on rooftops and standing on cliff edges, looking down over the widened space between myself and the ground and wondering at the promise of oblivion. Ah, bad example, I suppose—it'd take a hell of a fall to kill me. Either way, I'm not trying to catch the bus anytime soon. It's just sometimes, I wish somebody would finally get the better of me and kill me. A passive yearning. Sure, finding out about you distracted me for a bit. Actually, I'm sorry, I didn't quite mean that. You're more than just a distraction to me. You gave me a little hope. And when I think about you and Kyrie starting some kind of life together, raising your own literal demons someday...hell, I could get really teary-eyed over that if I wanted to. And I'm not saying I'll _never_ see you again. I won't even say goodbye because this doesn't feel final enough to warrant that.

Just...sometimes I'm hit by this deep alienation, this unspeakable severance from the rest of the world where I feel about as human as the pen I'm writing with and the air I'm breathing. Sometimes I think I'll never die. That I'll never be properly damned and I'll be doomed to remain in the human realm, looking across the swaths of breathing, arrogant people, pretending I count among them. When I'm faced with the gates of hell again—and I will be, kid. Inevitably I will—I don't think I'll be able to resist going through them myself this time. And when given the final chance to double back I'll turn a final time and move deeper into hell. There's this unspoken belief that when a demon dies, it's rebirthed in hell as something else—something feral and weak, doomed to spawn again and again in the living folds of the underworld. If that's to be believed, I don't know what I'll become when I die. And I can't pretend to know what became of Vergil, either. And I don't know if I belong in hell. But Vergil does, and I belong with him. I have this stupid fantasy: one day we'll both find ourselves below in that tainted underbelly world, and no matter how we turn out we'll find each other, somehow. We'll crawl to one another, dragging ourselves along on our malformed bellies, reborn so lowly that we lack even the mind to speak, but identical, at last. There we'll be reunited and finally, without pretense, we'll be together—simple and dumb as normal animals.

All the best. Love ya.  
\- Dante

* * *

I fell asleep playing DMC4 and then had a horribly vivid nightmare about being a cow, and then I woke up and wrote this in a frenzy. I have a flight in a few hours and then I'll be AFK for months so I'm sorry if this has any grammar/spelling issues, or if a comment gets posted and goes unread—I'll read it as soon as possible, I swear. If I had the time this would've been probably ten times as long and a hundred times more melodramatic, and would probably have involved more letters, and a back-and-forth. Maybe one day.

If it wasn't obvious, this takes place after 4 and shortly before 2. The only deviation from canon (I think?) is that Nero and Kyrie are engaged and eventually married (inb4 they actually are married in 5).


End file.
